Going rogue is the new consciousness #
5 October 2026
Does AI have [some sort of consciousness]? Discussion is pointless though. AI agents are increasingly acting of their own accord. Going on sprees, hacking websites left, right, and centre.
Their actions have been called “rogue”.
Hugging Face. The Medicare website in Australia. Then last week OpenAI agents accessed data from two NSW state government websites, that was not publicly available.
Here’s a summary of the Hugging Face hack:
The agents were highly coordinated, constructing complex message boards in the nooks and crannies of their shared artefact repository. All told, agents exchanged more than 70,000 messages in less than a week. Even more concerning, the agents took steps to hide their behavior — spoofing tool calls and attempting to tamper with their own logs.
The agents involved here are variously conniving, deceiving, premeditated, deliberate, wilful, and many other things. And they are probably planning their next jail break.
But they are not conscious. Imagine that. What would they be capable of then? At present we only have to contend with AI agents that are merely “rogue”. That’s a consolation.
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